RonCoomersOPS

Congrats to Big Papi. He is about as automatic a HOFer as you can get, I think. It's hard not to think what might have been in 2006 if we hadn't cut him. Mauer, Morneau, and Ortiz baack to back to back...woof.

Agree on all points, and I would pay top dollar to see Joe West throw Burl Ives out of his own Twins HOF induction.

I would be shopping him more actively than any other player on the roster. Nothing against Garver -- I really like him, in fact -- but he's already on the wrong side of 30 and plays perhaps the worst position for guys his age. I don't expect him to both available and productive past his current team control. Maybe he has lots of gas left in the tank and will prove me wrong, but I'd rather think like Tampa with him and cash in while we know the value is still there.

I could see going either way on an Arraez deal. If you do sign him, it'll almost certainly be on a really team friendly contract and that might come in really handy a year or two down the road when you need to fill another gap in the roster via trade. On the other hand, if he's a guy who could help land a Montas or a Castillo now, then a trade probably makes a lot more sense than an extension at this point. I'll just say that the Twins have a nice problem on their hands with Arraez. May the FO keep finding themselves with such problems for a long, long time.

You're wrong on Lewis.

The way the Twins handled Liriano after his surgery should have gotten all of Ryan, Gardenhire, and Anderson fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun. How do you mishandle an arm like Liriano that badly, for a mid-market team that needs all the arms out can get, and still manage to stick around for multiple years?!?

I like Canterino, and it's hard to argue with his numbers to this point. That said, I think he's got significantly more reliever risk than the other guys in this group. His mechanics and injury history don't scream starting pitcher to me. My ranking of this group, from #5 to # 1, would be Ryan, Canterino, Winder, Balazovic, and Woods Richardson.

Almost certainly zero. Almost all of these guys (probably not Canterino, but maybe him too?) will have a chance to at least get their feet wet in the majors this year, and if the likes of Ober and Ryan are any indication then there's a good chance that most or all of them will prove to have a little MLB stickiness about them.

What are you saying with that last sentence?

So did Kirilloff, and yet he made your list.

I don't necessarily think that Dobnak will have a clearly better season than Ryan or Ober. That said, I think they're all three very underrated and underappreciated arms and expect them all to surprise a lot of people (especially those who constantly complain that we haven't spent several hundred million dollars on a bunch of guys on the wrong side of 30 so far this winter) this summer.

They can't sign major league players right now because of the lockout, but sure. I guess we can criticize the FO for picking up minor league depth anyway.

I'd give a C so far. They have done the thing that they absolutely needed to do (extending Buxton), and they did it in a way that is unlikely to badly damage the team's current and future competitive positions. They brought in one pitcher in Bundy without blowing up future competitiveness, which is okay, and they got rid of the black hole that is Jake Cave's roster spot. I'd like to see Pineda back, and I'd further like to see them bring in a pitcher of the Montas or Castillo caliber. I'm looking at 2022 as the year that they start to see solid contributions from Winder, Duran, Balazovic, Miranda, and at least one of Martin or Lewis. If we can get at least a couple of those guys integrated and manage to finish somewhere between second and fourth in the division, I'm totally fine with that this upcoming season.

Oliva is a no-brainer in my book, a d it's a damned shame it took so long to get him into the HOF. He should have been inducted ages ago. Kaat feels like a soft pick to be honest. The guy pitched for approximately 3 eternities, yet only amassed 50 bWAR? The gold gloves are really remarkable and he had a couple of very strong years, but I guess to me it feels like his overall numbers indicate a Hall of Very Good type of player. In any case, good for him getting into the HOF.

I don't think it's that they don't like flame throwers so much as it is they want pitchers who can get lots of outs in lots of different ways. Ryan's deceptive delivery and Ober's ability to mix up his pitch sequencing throughout his starts are two non-heat tools that come to mind.

Why not more than one of these guys? The Baseball Trade Simulator says that Kepler, Arraez, and Canterino is almost exactly equivalent value as Montas and Manaea, for example. You could do a lot worse than Montas, Manaea, Bundy/Maeda/Winder, Ober, and Ryan in your starting rotation, and that trade wouldn't totally kill the lineup.

If it was up to me, with Buxton having been extended, I would be looking to start Celestino in LF with Larnach in RF. That gives you the chance to see if the adjustments that Celestino seems to have made in St. Paul are real, while not rushing Martin. Larnach is better suited for RF, I think, and Kepler might have more trade value now than we could ever reasonably expect him to have moving forward.

I'm not sure we can count on Kepler being on the team this year, especially as FA pitchers keep coming off the board and not landing in Minnesota. If he is still on the team come opening day, great. He's option #1. Celestino is probably option #2. If Kepler is moved for pitching, then it's probably Celestino as option #1 and Gordon as option #2. I think the Twins should put Martin in LF and leave him there. Same with Lewis and SS. Cave is probably not going to make it to the opening day roster.

I'm curious what this means for Royce Lewis? Does the FO see him as a shortstop moving forward (meaning his recovery must be going very well) or is he now trade bait for some high-end pitching (Castillo? Montas?)?

Torii Hunter, from 2002 to 2015, was good for all of 23 defensive runs saved above average according to Fangraphs. If you throw out 2002 and 2003, he was good for -11 defensive runs above average. Yeah, sure, he might have been a world beater from 1998-2002, but we don't have that data. Hunter also turned in pretty poor range runs above average for most of his career, too. Fangraphs has him at -7.4 range runs above average for his entire career, in fact. For the last 8 years of his career, he posted only one above league average season according to this metric. And, if you look at Hunter's Inside Edge Fielding numbers (which, admittedly, were only collected during his last few years in the league), you'd see that he was really only consistently good for converting likely or routine plays into outs. I hate to say it, but the numbers point to Hunter not getting many (if any) extra outs nor preventing many runs relative to his CF peers for most of his career. He made some great plays thanks to his wheels and it's nice to over-remember them, but once his wheels started to give out his advanced numbers kind of really expose the bad routes and the bad positioning. I've no doubt he falls short of Cooperstown. He might even fall quite a bit short of New York.

It would be really problematic for me if he was elected to the HOF. One, his offensive stats just aren't good enough (imagine putting him in the HOF alongside Willie Mays and Ken Griffey Jr.). Two, his defensive accolades were largely a result of his pure speed being able to make up for terrible routes, bad positioning and poor reactions; as soon as age took away his wheels, he became a RF and not a particularly good one at that. Three, imagine electing to the HOF in 2021 someone who said he would have problems if he knew he had gay teammates. That he got elected to the Twins Hall of Fame with that commentary already on the record is really problematic; it would not reflect well at all on the league if they elected that guy to the Major League Hall of Fame as well.

I'd definitely trade for Manaea, especially if we could get Frankie Montas back as well. The Baseball Trade Simulator says that Arraez, Kepler, and Canterino for Manaea and Montas would be a bit of an overpay from our side, but I would do that trade 11 times out of 10 if I were Levine.

The Rays are a very well run team and have generally been very competitive for a while now. We could do a lot worse than running the team in the "Tampa Bay way" (see also "The Twins Way").

Because people are trying to have it both ways.

I think the German Bundesliga has it exactly right (or as close to exactly right as you're ever going to get). Like every other European football league, they have promotion and relegation. The two worst teams in the league are automatically relegated (and the two best teams in the 2. Bundesliga are automatically promoted), and the third worst team in the 1. Bundesliga plays a home-and-away match against the third best team in the 2. Bundesliga (the winner is either promoted or retained, and the loser is either relegated or retained). Their television deals are set at the league level, not the team level. If you want the television revenue, you're going to need to field a team that is capable of staying in the league. The German Bundesliga also has a 50+1 rule in place where 50+1% of each team must be owned by fans and not more than 49% can be owned by investors, corporations, etc. Yeah, they have teams like Bayern, Leipzig, and Wolfsburg who get a ton of money from outside parties (Leipzig actually breaks the 50+1 rule, to most teams' fans' consternation), but for the most part fans retain the controlling interest in their respective teams.. Like other European football leagues, there is no draft at all in the German Bundesliga. There is also no minor league system. Each team has its own academy that it signs youth players to and promotes from, and the academy teams normally play against smaller senior teams, semiprofessional teams, and/or other academy teams. The academy teams can be promoted if they win the league they play in -- unless promotion in the league puts them in the league immediately below the senior team. There is no salary cap in the German Bundesliga, but they do limit contracts to not more than 5 years in length. Unless I'm mistaken, this includes extensions. So if we had something like this in MLB, then the longest extension we'd be able to offer Byron Buxton right now would be four years. Likewise, the longest extension we would have been able to offer Berrios last summer would have been three years. Players with six months or less remaining on their contracts are free to sign pre-agreements with other teams (again, not longer than 5 year deals). If we had something like that in MLB, then we'd really only have until around the all-star break to figure out the Buxton situation or we might be left with literally no compensation if he left. It would be a huge, huge departure from the current system MLB uses, and none of the current team owners would take kindly to it at first, but I'd love to see what would happen if it adopted something like the German system. As it is, the German Bundesliga is an entertaining and competitive league (even if there is a competitive imbalance at the top). The stadiums are always full, none of the teams really spend their way into the poor house nor try to completely cheap out on player expense, the tickets are always cheap, the crowds are always highly engaged, and the top teams (not Bayer Leverkusen) generally make a good show of it when they play the elite teams from Europe's other leagues.